Another one of my bicycle puncture repair days. It’s a lot like writing, really. The work, both grindingly tedious and yet curiously exacting: the anxiety about messing it up; the various stages at which things can go wrong; the growing hope that perhaps this time all will be well … And so you inflate the theoretically repaired tube. And then you leave it for a while, just in case you have messed up, and need to start again – this is the part like sending off your manuscript. And the hope and fear churn around like your socks and underpants in the tumble drier. And you almost don’t want to hear the result, in case it’s bad – because until that moment of rejection/deflation, there is still the hope. Anyway, the wheel is in the hallway now, and I’m afraid to go and check. Pray for me.

I’ve just been reminded that when I was a kid, any boy acting lah-di-dah was always called a Little Lord Fauntleroy. I used to get it quite a lot because of my fussy and prissy ways, now long abandoned, of course. I think there was a BBC Sunday afternoon series, as well as the book, Frances Hodgson Burnett, to keep it alive. But I wonder if it’s still a thing, to be called, I mean, Little Lord Fauntleroy when you make a fuss about your food or clothes, or if it’s too lost in the mists of time. And if it truly has gone, then somewhere wandering around, there is the last person ever to have been called a Little Lord Fauntleroy. I wonder if it’s me …

“Why do your feet smell of Christmas?”I’d been showing off my new novelty socks to Mrs McG – the ones that look like the cover of The Art of Failing. “What? Oh, it’s complicated.” I make it sound as if my feet are mixed up in some complex emotional web, my feet fancying Hayley, but Hayley’s gay, and fancies Su, who’s bi, and has a thing for Jo, who’s hot for Alex, who’s really into my feet. That sort of thing.“How complicated can it be?”“It goes back to when my golden crown fell off.” Now it’s a different sort of story – a comic fairy tale with a drunken prince and one of those new-style feisty feminist Disney princesses, who kick ass, but still look pretty when the ball comes round. But it’s really about my tooth. The crown fell off on a Friday evening, and I wouldn’t be able to see my dentist until the next week. So I bought an emergency crown repair kit from Boots. As well as some mouldable tooth putty, it contained a small bottle of clove oil. You were supposed to dribble it on the exposed stump. Which I did, but there was still more than half the little vial of it left. That was all a couple of years ago, and I’d found it again while looking for something else (too embarrassing to say what, exactly – let’s just call it ‘the ointment’). I had a quick google, and discovered that one of the uses for clove oil – which is not, in fact, oil used to lubricate your squeaky cloves, but oil made from squeaky cloves) was as a folk treatment for manky toenails. I have a manky toenail. It didn’t take a genius to realise that rather than just throwing the stuff away, it could be employed in its anti-fungicidal capacity. So I’d been drizzling it on my big toenail, the way Nigella used to drizzle good olive oil over pretty well anything (though not, as far as I remember, manky toenails). And the clove oil does, indeed, smell very Christmassy. I was going to explain all this, but I sensed that Mrs McG didn’t really care that much. So I just mumbled “Clove oil.” And then, “Squeaky cloves.”“Oh,” she said, her mind on other things. “Very festive.”

On our walk this morning I was made to pause while Monty investigated a big pile of leaves. I imagine it contained an alluringly complex aroma, made up of the wees of many dogs, with some fox poo. Anyway, while I was waiting, something landed on my head. I was a bit startled, as I had my earphones in, and had tuned out of the world. I may have uttered a cry of some kind. Perhaps a little screech. I put my hand to my head, and found that a leaf had landed on me – a huge London plane tree leaf, the size of a sheet from a tabloid newspaper. My mood changed from apprehension to wonder. In all my years of mooching around under trees, I couldn’t remember a single case of having been physically struck by a leaf – let alone have one land on me like that, as if deliberately piloted. ‘Steady, steady, two degrees to port … NOW, reverse thrusters!!!!’ I was marvelling at this when I noticed that a striking young woman was approaching me along the pavement. She was wearing flappy, purple velvet trousers – the term loon pants came into my head, though I don’t know if that’s right. Loon must come from pantaloons, which means trousers, so the whole thing has the whiff of tautology about it – a pair of trousers called trouser trousers. She was carrying a cat box. I don’t think there was a cat in it. Or anything (I mean there wasn’t a snake or a monkey in the cat box). But that’s not necessarily the sign of madness – there are all kinds of reasons why you might be carrying an empty cat box around with you. Do I mean cat box? The thing you carry cats in – wicker-work, with a metal grill at the front … She had a lovely face, and vast, Van der Graaf generator hair. Now this not unattractive young woman gave me a big smile. I suppose she must have seen the leaf fall on my head. And I smiled back. But then I wondered if all she’d seen was me putting my hand up to my head, which now had a leaf on it. Did she think I was the kind of person who put giant leaves on their head? Either a free spirit, or village idiot. And was she smiling condescendingly at the village idiot, or because she sensed an affinity – she with her enormous, flapping loon pants and empty cat box, and me with my leaf? I reduced my smile by about 30%, and pulled Monty away from the leaves. I should probably have made some amusing remark about her cat box – something about Schrödinger perhaps. But then who knows what might have happened?

I was sorting out the panniers on my bike after a moderately substantial shop at Sainsbury’s, when I head a voice behind me. “Excuse me, Sir…”I glanced back and saw a Sainsbury guy walking towards me. Instantly I played through the possibilities. Had I accidentally packed something without running it through the scanner? I doubted it, though great potential embarrassment loomed. Then it hit me. I’d paid the thirty quid in one pound coins, deriving great satisfaction as each one slid home. The coins were given to me at my school event yesterday – I flogged a few books at a loss-leading three quid a pop, just to have the rare pleasure of a reasonable signing queue. My guess was that this activity – paying in great piles of coins – probably brought up a red money-laundering flag. And it’s exactly what I’d do, if I had a few thousand quid in drug money I wanted to wash, from selling skag to primary school kids, or whatever. And I knew exactly how this was going to play out. “Sir, could you come back into the store please?” “What for?”“We want a word with you…”“That’s fine,” I say, firmly, but reasonably. I’ve been waiting for this moment ever since passing O level Law with flying colours (back in 1983, before grade inflation, a B was still counted as flying colours). “But I first have to inform you of your rights…”“Er, my rights …”“Yes, you see, you can only force me to return to the store by placing me under a citizen’s arrest – which you’re quite entitled to do. The trouble is that if I an not subsequently found guilty of a criminal offence, you will be guilty both of the criminal offence of unlawful imprisonment, and also the Civil Law equivalent. For the former you can be imprisoned for up to fifteen years, and for the latter there are unlimited damages. So I advise you to proceed very carefully …” I was about 75% sure that this was true, as 1983 was a long time ago. But 75% is more than I usually have to go on.And this succeeds in throwing the man into utter confusion. He doesn’t know whether to wrestle me to the ground or slink off. Then his boss, and a security guard turn up. I explain the same thing to them, and they offer full apologies, and let me go. Anyway, I played that all out in my imagination, in far less time than it takes to tell. “You dropped this,” says the man – a youth, really, wispy hair on his face. He’s holding out my bank card. “Oh, thanks. I’m, always bloody doing that.”A satisfactory outcome, I think you’ll agree, for Perry Como. I mean Mason. Whoever.

I took Monty for a walk in West Hampstead cemetery yesterday. I don’t know what it is about cemeteries that always makes me think of death, etc, but anyway, I was sitting on a bench feeling sorry for myself, thinking about my own demise, and of all the terrible things that will happen before it. I’m in a bit of a trough at the moment. I can’t sleep. My teeth hurt. Writing is hard and slow, and also shit. The cricket season has finished, leaving me with memories mainly of disappointment. My hopes that I’d acquire interesting new abilities and skills as I aged has proved illusory: I’ve never learned the trombone or the fandango or how to speak foreign languages beyond the universal “uno biera por favore, garcon”. Quite the reverse, in fact. Those few gifts that I once had are slipping away. Where once I could fart the whole of God Save the Queen, I now can manage only the first note. So there I was, staring blankly out over the graves, my fat arse extruding itself through the slats of the bench, when I heard above me a twittering. I recognised the sound as the calls of long-tailed tits – they chatter to each other as they travel around in their winter flocks. I stared up into the branches of the scruffy willow over my head. It took a few seconds to find the first of them, but then the others came into focus. Two, five, ten, maybe more. Usually, you only see them as they skip ahead of you through the trees, never still for a second. But this flock stayed right over me for a couple of minutes. I’ve always loved long-tailed tits, since I first saw them in my Ladybird Book of Garden Birds. We didn’t get them in my part of Yorkshire – the flat and barren dank prairie-land of the Vale of York, so they seemed impossibly exotic and glamourous – tiny birds of paradise. I lived in my Ladybird Books, back then. I had a big collection, neatly lined up along the back of my nature table (the top of the chest of drawers in the bedroom I shared with my brother). A pheasant’s wing. A seahorse. What else? I can’t remember. By the time the flock had dematerialised, their calls still reaching faintly from off-stage, and then silence, I realised that my face was stiff from smiling: you can’t be sad when a flock of long-tailed tits are dancing around your head.

A few minutes ago I formed an intense desire for some plums (which are the only fruit I actually enjoy eating, rather than taking medicinally to fend off scurvy). I assumed we wouldn’t have any, but when I wandered into the kitchen, there were , astonishingly, some perfect purple plums, looking as though they’d been picked for a Chinese Emperor. But then when I bit into one, I found that it had no discernible flavour at all – not the least hint of plum. No, that isn’t actually true. It tasted like cotton wool that had been burped into by someone who’d recently eaten a plum. This seemed to sum up so much of the author’s life. Desire born at the same moment as the knowledge of the impossibility of its attainment; then the false hope; and then the disappointing reality. And then you die. Or, perhaps, the hangover diminishes, and you finish the rest of the plums, and you think they weren’t so bad after all.
And all this made me wonder why it should be plums that I love and not kumquats or persimmons, or mangoes, and a moment’s reflection led me to the answer. I was largely brought up in a small town/big village called Sherburn-in-Elmet, outside Leeds. The place was famous from the middle ages for its plum trees. There were still a couple of orchards there, when I was a boy, but they were grubbed up and turned to a housing estate and a barren space for dog walkers and ‘joggers’, of which Sherburn has never boasted so much as one.
The very last plum tree in town leaned over the cricket field boundary at third man. I used to open the bowling, and would be posted down there in between my overs, and I’d pluck the plums and eat them, and then spit the stones into the air and volley them into the orchard.
So, yes, for me plums are the fruits of memory and nostalgia and decay. And jam.

(This is a view of the village church. The last orchard began just at the bottom of the photo.)

It suddenly occurred to me on my late night walk with Monty that I hadn’t seen the moon in ages – months, it seemed. So I had a proper look for it, peering between the gables and chimneys, and down the long streets.
Nothing.
I began to become a little alarmed.
The moon simply wasn’t there anymore.
How had this happened without the world noticing? What would be the consequences? Tides … ladies’ problems … lunar metaphors … all gone.
And now it had vanished, I realised that I couldn’t even remember what it looked like. I tried to picture it, but all I could ‘see’ were the memories of illustrations of the moon, and not the moon itself. They had the wrong level of clarity. Usually memory adds a degree of haze to what was clear, rendering outlines indistinct. But on this occasion the metamorphosis had been reversed, and that which was hazy had become unnaturally distinct.
But this was all just whimsy. I turned a corner and there it was, in its usual place, just behind Waitrose. A pleasant creamy colour, with just the right degree of haze. I say just behind Waitrose but, of course, if you yourself were standing behind Waitrose that wouldn’t be the case. Then the moon would be behind something else. I don’t know, whatever it is that’s behind Waitrose. Not that I’ve ever been behind Waitrose. Why would I? Except now the idea of ‘behind Waitrose’ draws me. I’m imagining a new world, full of wonders. A bowling alley. An orphanage. A petting zoo.

(This is not the moon. It’s a ginnel, near my flat. Sort of pretty though, eh?)